A while back, I was randomly thinking about how amazing it would be if RTS games could become Massively Multiplayer. This is next to impossible to do of course, since it would have to utilize a system like the Total War games of recruiting armies in an overworld and only battling with them when they met enemies or invaded other nests, not to mention the logistical nightmare of multiple enemies mobilizing at once. But it's still a fun concept!

The idea, of course, was an ant RTS. People would pick a species to play as and chaos would ensue as colonies grew, shrank, and died in the never ending conquest for resources. But then I wondered how a game like that would play if people could also choose termites, bees, and wasps/hornets. It would add extra depth in that everyone has to be concerned. Bees have larva and honey aplenty that hornets and ants respectively want. Hornets need to worry about retaliation with their relatively low numbers, and so on and so forth.

And then, one night, the idea hit me. What would it be like for termites, a famously defensive group due to their vegetarian diet, to utilize large, domed heads as a defense, blocking entrances from invaders with thick, chitin covered shields to buy time for the workers to seal off as much as they could of the larva and the royal chamber. This caste would be next to unable to fight, sacrificing biting power to dedicate their heads solely to being a shield that would take seemingly endless gnawing to chew through. Then I wondered how ants, for example, would be able to crack these defenses open more efficiently. My thought was a ridiculously large caste with thin, hooked jaws. They would be able to find a small gap somewhere between the termite and the surrounding earth and hook behind the shield to yank them out with brute force and let the swarm rush in.

And that really got me pondering. What would a game like that be, with various traits that could be evolved to facilitate different play styles, and the need to evolve new traits as your enemies change, and new ones appear to provide whole new challenges. How do hornets respond if bees evolve toxic hairs that they fill the sky with, forcing the hornets to land to try and groom and leaving them vulnerable to be swarmed and stung, dropping one by one? Perhaps a thicker armor that, while making them more cumbersome in the air, will allow them to shrug off the stings as they groom, requiring a lot more to take them out and giving them time to get back into fighting condition and slaughtering bees. How does a colony of ants respond to rivals with thick armor that their mandibles can barely penetrate? Evolve a caste that sprays acid, melting their foes thick exoskeleton away and incapacitating them, leaving them vulnerable to be ripped apart, or alternatively, evolve a caste of larger, stronger soldiers which simply break open the thick-armored enemies like a nutcracker does a walnut.

I simply wanted to post this to see if the AntsCanada community could come up with their own ideas, as one mind can only come up with so much! It can be anything, be they taken from existing species or something completely original. I may even draw cruddy concept art for some of them down the line if this takes off (which it probably won't), if someone else doesn't (which they won't).

I love the idea! a while back I was browsing to find games about ants (no reason why other than my obsession of them) but I could not find a good game, this sound great. It would be a good idea for the species making to be like Stellaris (if you ever heard about it) where each person has a certain amount of trait points and the good trait cost more and you can even chose bad traits to get more points (EX. the trait adaptive to tropics -3 points while very small is +2 to your point value)

Then you can change how your ant looks where your options given to you reflect your traits. Then you would join the game in a random area in your preferred climate and start as a newly mated alate queen (just so you can chose your nest site exactly where you want it and then once you dig your nest somewhere then you can do total war style. over all I love the idea and wish it would become a reality.

almost one year of ant keeping

keeping:
a failing camponotus colony
one crematogaster queens
and three lasius umbratus queens

Well, Evolution does have a trait exchanging system so maybe I can do that for the needing to evolve. Hummm, interesting idea...Either way, I'd need a massive list of traits for each kind of insect before I could consider it. Bees won't exactly have any need for the ant's hooked jaws trait, nor will hornets find use out of a shield head trait for termites. Plus I'd need to find out what to do should multiple people want to be ants, or bees, or wasps, or even termites.

Last edited by dinoman9877 on Wed Jan 10, 2018 1:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Well, Evolution does have a trait exchanging system so maybe I can do that for the needing to evolve. Hummm, interesting idea...Either way, I'd need a massive list of traits for each kind of insect before I could consider it. Bees won't exactly have any need for the ant's hooked jaws trait, nor will hornets find use out of a shield head trait for termites.

if youd like id be willing to put some sort of time into something like this